


Good Girls Go to Heaven

by Quantum_Tarantino



Category: Original Work
Genre: Attempt at Humor, F/F, Grossly Butchered Biblical Interpretations, Heaven vs Hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 22:03:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18536347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quantum_Tarantino/pseuds/Quantum_Tarantino
Summary: Sonya has a cushy un-life in Hell. She can spend her days suborning mortals into forfeiting their souls, bullying office imps and generally having a grand old time as a cog of the infernal bureaucratic machine.Things do not go as planned, though, as she gets sent on an unexpected – and unprecedented – mission to... Heaven?





	Good Girls Go to Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Hello yes this is QT and the rumors of my loss of hands to write with are greatly exaggerated.  
> My writing motivation and inspiration have been absolutely dead as of late on top of some IRL busyness, so I haven't gotten a lot of stuff written down, much less published.
> 
> This piece here is something I did for fun on the side to flex my writing muscle a bit. The concept started as off-the-cuff shitposting on Discord with Awesome-est, and for reasons unknown to man the idea lived on beyond the first talk and I ended up fleshing it out enough to warrant putting it out there. I don't have a lot (read: anything whatsoever of substance) planned after the first few chapters, but I had enough that I wanted to publish the start at the very least.

Sonya hummed in contemplation, looking at a piece of parchment on her desk. The name plaque on her office door was quite a bit longer than the name she usually went by, but she had never much cared for the name derived from the Key of Damnation in front of the pit she had crawled out from a few millennia ago. No, the butchered version of that name which had been once uttered by a drunken escort during one of her more pleasant trips to Earth served just as well. There were a few who shunned her disdain for tradition, but in the grand scheme of things, Hell was built on rebellion and disrespect so that was only par for the course.

She stretched, holding back a yawn before giving in and opening her mouth wide, tracing her fingers on the elegant horns she bore on her head. She still had a few hours in front of her, and while Hell was rebellion incarnate, the powers that be could get absolutely biblical if people didn't punch in their times properly. She finished the stretch and picked up her pen again, blinking a few times as she had forgotten all about what she was currently negotiating.

Ah, yes, a thousand souls for a kingdom. The amount of would-be rulers driving bargains like that was astonishingly high, especially when logic would dictate that if Hell were one to play straight with deals like that, there would be no end to short-lived monarchies up on Earth. 

Well, the people willing to sell a thousand of their compatriots to eternal damnation probably weren't the brightest of the bunch, either. More interestingly though, reading through the wording provided, it seemed like the current client had read up on the subject of diabolical statutes, and there seemed to be a curious implicit loophole in the contract which would get him more than he was paying for. She twirled her pen for a moment, deep in thought. She could just pull out the rejection stamp and get him singed based on bad-faith negotiating. Trying to cheat in Hell was welcome and encouraged, but actually getting caught doing that was a different deal entirely. Agreements and contracts of all sorts with celestial beings carried more weight with them than those between mortals which was something earthlings seemed to gloss over curiously often. Alternatively, she could spin the game on this upstart and tack on the usual confusingly worded addendum which would relieve Hell from delivering on said kingdom based on almost arbitrary criteria, but...

She got up and reached into the filing cabinet, feeling the lesser imps within stir and respond to her will. Chronically lazy bastards, those, and utterly livid at being forced to play courier, but the bindings held them tight and soon enough Sonya could feel one of them puff into existence and offer a bundle of parchments to her. She took the documents and slammed the cabinet shut with more force than necessary, enjoying the muted squeaks coming from within, and spread the papers on her desk.

A set of maps from the area neighboring the kingdom in question, a few genealogical records, the scraps of a diary of a leader, a bunch of manifests and some other odds and ends regarding people and places of importance nearby. The amount of detail the Accursed Archives held on damn near everything was as impressive as it was useful, she had found. There were certain upsides to having a large portion of postmortem immigrants being lawyers and clerical types.

She looked at the spot of land on the map which the upcoming ruler was wanting as his own. Fairly irrelevant all in all. No particularly strong ties to any major powers, and while it was nominally aligned with the Church, it was near the borderlands of civilization and thus probably kept more to the religions of old which consequently meant that it was filled with pagans and blasphemers, in other words prime pickings for Hell, and the Heavens couldn't kick up too big of a stink if something untoward were to happen. She pursed her lips and glanced over the neighboring states. No remarkable ones there either, though on the parchment someone had jotted down a tangle of political ties between them that muddled the waters a lot.

She tapped the end of her pen a few times on one of the kingdom's borders as she sat back down. She had been in this line of work for long enough to see that there was something in there to be exploited, and she started picking apart the alliance manifest. A few blood oaths which should hold. A few of the ruling families were closely intertwined so mutual assistance was expected, but one of them was also allied to a mortal enemy of the central kingdom which caused some friction. She flipped over a few pages, scanning over the lines and trying to puzzle out the crux of the situation as she visualized the flow of politics and commerce between them. Her intuition was telling her that there was someone in there to be screwed, and as a demon that intuition tended to be correct more often than not.

She browsed over the scattered papers for a while until she eventually huffed in annoyance, dropping the trade agreement she had been poring over. The area was so splintered that now she was all but certain that there was a way of maneuvering the nations against each other, but she just couldn't see it. Subverting mortals was not only a hobby but also her job, and she had wanted to figure it out with just her wits alone because a demons who grew complacent didn't grow old. The dead end she had found herself in did seem insurmountable, so she resigned and picked up the genealogical charts she had been ignoring, immediately feeling her eyes drawn to certain branches there.

There were more clerical demons out there who could play with legislative loopholes like Belial does with toddler souls, but as a succubus, her forte lay elsewhere. When she looked at the lineages, their shapes spoke to her. She could sense the tangle of emotions there, a picture painting itself half by intuition and half by educated guesses as things fell into place into the more clinical network of politics she had gleaned from the paperwork. Political marriages, true love, betrayal, cheating, resentment, forgiveness, the works. Few noble trees were short on those, but...

She grinned as a key piece of the system clicked together, the mess of people and relationships in her mind coalescing into something coherent as the surname of the person offering the deal made a connection. A long-lost bastard heir? Quite possibly. That would require some research to verify, but it would also explain quite a bit regarding his motivations and, more importantly, provide leverage on the sitting king. She could already see the contract in her mind. A thousand souls offered, but there was more to be had there. There was a succession crisis brewing there, and with the right nudges, she could cause all sorts of trouble. At least a few of the neighboring heads of state also seemed to have some diabolic inclinations, so perhaps a demonstration of force would incentivize them to make offerings of their own. Or, should the current king be callous enough, he could match his usurper to keep the crown on his own head.

She pushed the papers aside, drawing a new leaf and scrawling down a few requisition orders. A few record-hunters to gather some additional information, a permit for a large-scale soul transaction, a temporary Terrestial license for in-person interviewing... She held that for a moment, wondering if she should go herself. The man wishing to be a king would be easy enough to convince and great practice for a novice, but she'd want to have a talk with the current king too. That would be a tougher nut to crack, and they would have to figure out an angle before going in with a deal. She had been good at making men do to her bidding, back when she used to do field missions.

She ended up applying two copies of the permit. She scrawled her own signature on the bottom of the paper without paying much attention to the calligraphy. The imps would sort it out, and she heard peeps of displeasure as she pushed the papers into the outgoing box. That done, she turned around to look over the papers splayed on her desk, smiling. It was a good job. Outwitting good people was just... banal. Like frying fish in a barrel. She didn't get why so many of her kin took so much pleasure over corrupting virgins and whatever was the fad of the century when it was just so much more satisfying to cheat a cheat.

Her smile widened as she sat down again, staring at the family tree. Yes, there was definitely leverage there. And if her intuition wasn't entirely incorrect here, maybe she could maneuver the opposing family branch into a feud, inciting a—

_"Sonstyganaerix,"_ rang a jarring voice in her office which jolted her out of her plotting. She looked up, seeing her boss staring her down, eyes aflame with rage.

"Sup?" she asked, moving the papers away from the embers dropping down from his eyes. For a person who worked with paper, Andrealphus was astonishingly uncaring of his natural state of being a fire hazard. For all his faults though, he was rather level-headed even if the paperwork from him was usually at least charred.

_"You are requested at the Atrium,"_ he said with his voice reverberating from the stone walls, and Sonya resisted the urge to cringe. Lack of indoor voice was another one of his inconvenient characteristics. Atrium summons was rather unexpected, though, and in reflex she already had half a dozen of practiced excuses forming, most of them backed by some amount of alibis and paperwork. People who did well were left alone, and people who got summoned there were not in for a good time. Well, unless the lower-downs had miraculously decided that she was due for a promotion in the ranks, and that wasn't due for at least half a millennium especially considering that one fiasco over at Styria a decade ago or so...

"Must be a misunderstanding," she lied fluidly. "Why would they want me there? If it's about the deposit records, it wasn't my—"

_"Under Seal,"_ he said, interrupting her. She stared at her for a moment and fought the urge to swallow as the echo of the word sat heavily in the air. If it really was under the Seal, that meant that whatever orders were coming for her came from a very, very low place. She briefly wondered if running was on the table. She knew her way around the system so given a small headstart she could probably... _maybe_ make it to Earth in disguise before the hellhounds were after her, but she was quite short on time now.

"I, ah, well," she said, trying and failing to find a viable excuse to defy an official summons, "I'll just get my—"

_"Now,"_ Andrealphus said and pointed at the door. _"They insist."_

Sonya nodded and got up on reflex, some deep part of her compelled to follow the orders. Who that 'they' was was the million-soul question here, but apparently she was not going to get to know. She waved at Andrealphus from the door and hurried down the corridors, mind running a mile a minute. What could it be? True, she had embezzled no small amount of funds and she was blackmailing two of her superiors and she still hadn't paid dividends from a fifth of her transactions – but everyone did that, right? And not paying the dividends wasn't even against the scripture since she _was_ paying them, she just had happened to find herself in the fortunate situation where the recipient of said payments was also herself which was not against any footnote in the book.

She worried her lip as she made it past the reception before leaving the building, entering the bustling streets of Dis. The day was dark, red and overcast, as it tended to be when you lived in an infernal cavern. There were souls all over, both demonic and human, with a few fallen angels occasionally dotting the streets. She pushed past a devil trying to peddle a hex to her, grabbing an unsuspecting gorgon by the back of her belt and pulling her between Sonya and the annoying devil. The dark stone buildings sprawling around her were familiar from her years there, as was the amorphous populace of Hell, perpetually clawing at itself to get by. Ever shifting, ever moving.

A flock of imps were harrying some lost soul on the side, but she was too busy to pay much attention. Did her excuses even matter? In day-to-day office work it was rote to lie, cheat and steal with red tape and signatures, but even if most of that did stand up to some scrutiny, anyone with the power to put a summon under Seal on her would also have the power to just tell her to stop existing. Bureaucracy was doing fine things to the economy of Hell, but the roots in the belief that might makes right still stood over everything. If someone that down low wanted her dead, they could do that with a blink and nobody would bat an eye.

She was lost in thought as she made her way to the Atrium, absent-mindedly breaking the fingers of some imp which tried to pickpocket her on the way. But why Atrium, though? If it was one of the Dukes asking her – or the big man himself, God permit – then they should've told her to come to the Citadel itself where they made their lairs. Atrium was an important building, certainly, but it was important for the everyday people who moved to and from Hell. It was an enormous brass spire, extending from the rocky floor high into the ceiling, the tip of it perpetually blanketed by thick clouds of sulfur. From there you could make your way to the Limbo and beyond, and it served as a central place for controlling the flow of the population. Only way in and the only way out.

She joined the flow of people going in there through the main doors, her chest constricting as she entered the imposing building. Another amateur pickpocket tried to take advantage of her distracted state, and she slapped the encroaching hand away without even thinking. It wouldn't necessarily be the end of her to be here, right? Maybe they just wanted to consult her on something. It was a comforting thought, at least, and she blinked when she realized that in her nervousness she herself had nabbed a golden bracelet from one of the passersby. She looked it over briefly and took an annoyed breath, pocketing the trinket. An old anxiety tick of hers.

She made her way to the receptionist, putting her lapse of focus in use by bribing him with the bracelet to cut in front of the usual rabble, letting her make her way up the twisting onyx stairs towards the floor she had been directed to. The higher she got, the less people there were, until she was all alone in the unnatural quiet as she finally reached her destination. Empty and as silent as a grave.

"Welcome, miss Sonstyganaerix. You are expected."

Sonya hid her surprise and turned to meet the speaker, seeing one of the servants standing behind her in a black suit. Its face was covered in a plain white mask which hided the amalgamation of soul scraps that served as a facsimile of intelligence. "And who is the one expecting?" she asked, trying to ferret out some information so that she wouldn't go in blind.

"Under Seal," it said, its tone an annoying, droning monotone. "This way, miss."

It gestured towards one of the corridors, and she followed it. Maybe she could still make a break for it. Servants were pretty dumb as far as familiars went, so she could probably lock it up for a while by asking some recursive questions, but she had no permit to leave Hell which would be a bigger obstacle.

Before she found a way out, they arrived in front of a large door, and her time was up. The servant turned back, leaving her standing alone for a few moments before she steeled herself and pushed the door open.

**Author's Note:**

> If you do recognize some of the names, good eye. Most of them have been shamelessly lifted off various manuscripts and the like and then put together in a haphazard manner based on careful consideration of my own whims.


End file.
